- June 17, 2020
- Posted by: Hritik Ganju
- Category: DISCRIMINATION, Featured, Latest Work, LIVELIHOOD DEVELOPMENT, OPINION
The Indian caste system is often regarded as a crippling affliction of the past. However, this malicious framework of prejudice and discrimination is still omnipresent, continuing to inflict its ideals of inequality on a multitude of socio-economic indicators. At a time when economies are skirmishing through a worldwide pandemic, the future of the labour market takes centre stage. India’s job market has been suffering for a couple of years now, and with no indication of a plausible vaccine for Covid-19 in the near future, the problem does not seem to improve any time soon. With thousands of people losing jobs and livelihoods during these times, a pivotal question thus arises – Do social discrimination and socioeconomic realities intensify the atrocities faced by certain communities in the labour economy?
Scheduled Castes are overtly dependent on wage labour since land, a self sustaining productive asset, is not easily available to them. According to India Land and Livestock Holding Survey, about 60% of Dalit households did not own a farmland in 2013. This complements the wage dependancy statistics revealed by the NSSO – indicating that the share of wage labourers among the Scheduled Castes was 63% as compared to 42% for the upper castes in 2012. Strikingly, within this fraction of daily wage workers, the share of casual labourers is about 47% for SCs as compared to 33% for upper castes. This further intensifies job insecurity and poor earnings for SCs, making them more susceptible to the economic repercussion of the virus.
However, these initial differences in endowments and wage-work dependancy are not the only sources of discrimination in the labour market. Empirical and experimental evidence has suggested that hiring practices discriminate excruciatingly among different castes. Last available national statistics for unemployment from Census-2011 indicate that the Scheduled Caste unemployment rate has always been the highest among all groups in India since 1990. In 2012, Dalit unemployment rate was 1.7% higher than the national average. These facts, could also be explained by the evidence suggested by various authors over the course of the last two decades. Thorat and Attewell in 2007 conducted an interesting experiment that explains this ‘employer bias’ against specific castes. Responding to certain newspaper advertisements, they sent out exactly identical resumes to private conglomerates. The applications only differed in terms of easily identifiable names of different castes and religion – Hindu upper caste, Muslims and Hindu Dalits. The results were astoundingly unsettling. For every 100 upper caste applicants selected, only 67 equally qualified Hindu Dalits and 33 Muslims got an interview call back. It shows that even though the only aspect of family background revealed to the private employers was the applicant’s name, it was enough to insinuate different patterns of responses from Dalits to Muslims, compared to Hindu upper caste. Similar results are also produced by Siddique (2009) for a study in Chennai, implying that caste based discriminatory practices are persistent even in the first stage of employment.
In any sort of identifying study on discrimination, economists and policy makers often try to decompose their results into explained and unexplained components. However, we have noticed that even after these studies control for differing levels of education, skill, ability, and experience, there is still a persistent discriminatory component against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes that has no economical backing. Various decomposition studies have been conducted to understand the trend of these unexplained discriminatory components over the years. In 2014, Ashwini Deshpande and Rajesh Ramachandran trace the changes in standard-of-living indicators across various caste groups over the last decade. These indicators were based on employment, income, expenditure and education. They find that over the last ten years, the unexplained part of wage gap between upper caste and SC/ST/OBCs has increased. In terms of income, however, they see that over the past decade the average wage gap between upper and lower castes has declined. Even though this seems like a welcome development, when the authors breakdown wages by their distribution, they find that for workers in the upper half – those that have a wage higher than the median – the wage gap has significantly increased, indicating a divergence among higher paying jobs. Further, there has also been a divergence in terms of access to white collar jobs in the last decade, which implies that SCs, STs and OBCs have continued to have a lower access to these prestigious and coveted opportunities.
Madheswaran and Attewell (2007) examine the wage gaps among upper caste and SC/STs in the regular salaried urban labour market. They find that among equally qualified upper castes, SC/ST workers face 15% lower wages. Additionally, these discriminatory effects can be seen in both the public and private sectors with adverse effects being much larger in the private sector. Apart from distortions in Labour Demand, in 2020 Suanna Oh of Columbia University shows the existence of distortionary effects in Labour Supply. She conducts an experiment to understand how caste identity impacts India’s rural job market. Oh discovered that many workers were averse to take up jobs that involved working with castes ranked lower than their own. This classic labour supply problem insinuated that job take up rates fell by 47% when caste associated with the available offers was ranked lower than the workers’ own in the caste hierarchy. In a separate experiment, Oh shows that 43% of people refused to spend even 10 minutes on tasks with other castes, even when they were offered a pay that was 10 times their daily wage. Since workers with same talent and skillset avoid certain occupations due to caste identity, it could lead to a significant misallocation of talent in the economy.
The Dalit community has long been associated with occupations that are considered ‘polluting’ such as waste picking, manual scavenging and forced prostitution. Even though constitutionally prohibited, many members of the Dalit community are still occupationally dependant on menial wage labour or richer upper castes due to unavailability of other opportunities. Lack of implementation of legislative frameworks often promotes the age old practice of forced and bonded labour. Forced labour not only includes physical or legal elements as generally thought, but it also includes deprivation of alternative choices, economic circumstances and being subjected to being underpaid or provide unpaid labour. Agriculture, which occupies about 64% of the entire workforce has far more bonded labourers than all other industries in India combined. These conditions are generally the harshest, with gruelling work, menial pay and long hours. Agricultural labour in rural areas is often associated with caste where landowners are generally of a higher caste and landless and bonded labourers. This makes Dalits most susceptible to forced and bonded labour.
Other than overt discrimination in the labour market, evidence has also suggested that various caste groups enter the labour force with substantial differences in education. This sort of pre-market discrimination becomes important to analyse since access and quality of education and resources could be fundamental in determining ones’ ability, skills and access to future opportunities. This would necessarily ensure that outcomes will be unequal even if there was no active labour market discrimination. Deshpande and Ramachandran (2014) also concluded that the gaps between lower and upper caste with regards to access to higher education have increased in the last decade. Lesser number of Dalits and OBCs are attaining higher education today than they were 10 years ago. This results in caste being a determining factor of ones’ educational attainment.
This is where the importance of Affirmative Action kicks in. Affirmative Action is defined to be a set of policies that aim to positively support members of a disadvantaged or underrepresented groups that have suffered discrimination in the past in terms of education, employment and housing. However, debates against the use of these policies have been prevalent in the economy. Many suggest that Affirmative Action often causes reverse discrimination – discrimination against the upper caste students and workers. They argue that instead of striving for a caste free economy, we are moving closer to one where economic positions are legally determined through caste lines. There is a view among the upper castes that in certain lower caste communities the parents have already gone up the social ladder and have been able to provide benefits to their children that are often denied to other much poorer young people. It has been argued strenuously that AA policies would destroy market competitiveness and lead to further inefficiency in the economy.
However, the arguments supporting Affirmative Action policies become far more convincing when we look at the statistics mentioned above. Ashwini Deshpande, a pioneer economist working in the field of Economics of Discrimination since the past 30 years, believes that these policies are nothing more but a form of social engineering for the lower caste communities that have been denied (and are continued to be denied) equal educational and occupational opportunities. The Dalit communities argue that most of these special privileges accrue to higher caste Hindu population who can tap into their social and capital networks. Markets and economies are immersed in social relationships, and hence are more prone to be influenced by social customs rather than ideas of meritocracy. Due to existing socio-economic conditions of the Dalits, and having been a part of only lowly paying jobs and menial work, Dalits often do not have the required social networks to achieve higher paying, top level white-collar jobs. This fundamental of ‘who you know’ versus ‘what you know’ often creates a vicious cycle for the lower caste communities, where due to denied privileges in the past, the community is not able to bring itself out of those miseries. Hence, to uplift these communities it is important to create certain changes in the economy to eventually lead towards a desirable equilibrium.
It can however, unanimously be agreed upon that only proper implementation of these Affirmative Action policies is what can eventually create this balance in the economy. In India, however, these implementation practices have often had major flaws. It has often been observed that political parties continuously increase quotas and reservations in order to fuel their political interests. Considering lower caste population to be an easily tappable vote bank, the political agendas often lead to misallocation of these policies which completely diminishes the objective of these policies. Instead of subverting caste based practices, it in turn propagates them. AA policies should be continually revised, rewritten and rectified with the sole motive to empower people so that they do not need them anymore. Its success depends on its extinction rather than its continuation. Even though these policies have an impact only in the public sector as of now, it would still be a step towards an economy that flourishes on the ideas of meritocracy and efficiency, rather than caste and religion. If the policy measures are applied keeping the objective of uplifting communities to the extent that they do not need these policies anymore, Affirmative Action can prove honest to its original agenda.
References/Works Cited
- “Caste-Based Slavery in India.” International Dalit Solidarity Network, 15 Jan. 2015, idsn.org/key-issues/caste-based-slavery/caste-based-slavery-in-india/.
- “Scheduled Castes among Worst Sufferers of India’s Job Problem.” Hindustan Times, 7 Sept. 2018, www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/scheduled-castes-among-worst-sufferers-of-india-s-job-problem/story-Qh0hyHy9UUTg1cIOpi5l2K.html.
- Bijral, Quleen Kaur Bijral. “Affirmative Action: The System Of Reservations And Quotas In India.” The Logical Indian, The Logical Indian, 7 Oct. 2015, thelogicalindian.com/story-feed/awareness/affirmative-action-the-system-of-reservations-and-quotas-in-india/?infinitescroll=1.
- Deshpande, Ashwini, and Rajesh Ramachandran. “How Backward Are the Other Backward Classes? Changing Contours of Caste Disadvantage in India.” Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics, Nov. 2014.
- Deshpande, Ashwini. “Social Justice through Affirmative Action in India: an Assessment.” Capitalism on Trial, 2012, doi:10.4337/9781782540854.00029.
- Madheswaran, S. and Paul Attewell. 2007. “Caste discrimination in the Indian urban labour market”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLII, No. 41, October 13, 2007
- Oh, Suanna. “Does Identity Affect Labor Supply?” Centre on Global Economic Governance, May 2020.
- Prakash, Aseem. “Dalit Capital and Markets: A Case of Unfavourable Inclusion.” Journal of Social Inclusion Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2018, pp. 51–61., doi:10.1177/2394481118774478.
- Siddique, Zahra (2009): “Caste Based discrimination: evidence and policy”, Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA)
- Thorat, Sukhadeo and Paul Attewell. 2007. “The legacy of social exclusion: A correspondence study of job discrimination in India”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLII, No. 41, October 13.
The views expressed in this paper are the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of PCI, its Board of Directors, or the governments they represent.
